fwiw these are similar complaints of high tier wireless noise cancelling headphones. Lack of wired fallback for the mic is common enough, I suspect it has to do with the bluetooth SOC on the device.
Airpods Max Sucked for Me
31–40 of 45 posts
Re: Airpods Max Sucked for Me
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
> activating the mic on bluetooth headsets [...] brings the audio bitrate down to a quality comparable to AM radio This is actually an artifact of the BT profile used. It is the same for most bluetooth headsets (all I know), and the same for all operating systems I know. Usually most people don't realize because when they enable the mic they're listening to... well, other people (definitely not music) and human voice…
I'm curious as to why the same BT profile achieved 8kHz to my Big Sur Mac with a Bluetooth 4.0 chipset, 16 kHz to a Big Sur MacBook with a Bluetooth 4.2 chipset and 24 kHz to the iPhone 11 Pro with a 5.0 chipset (and the other custom Apple chips of course). Any ideas?
How do you measure that? Most likely this is some Apple propietary sheninangs so all bets are off. They are probably limiting things in software for reasons.
It is highly unlikely to be related to the BT version itself. There have been no bandwidth improvements to classic Bluetooth for decades. And Apple is unlikely to use LE Audio since BT 4.0 didn't had the required bandwidth for even full duplex 8kHz.
Re: Airpods Max Sucked for Me
#33Audio / bluetooth on macs is currently a total disaster. My newer macs - mainly a 2019 15" - have some truly bizarre behaviors around these. One example is that if I switch 3.5mm audio cables too quickly it starts routing audio to my HDMI monitor instead. Macs still can't control the volume of HDMI audio out so that means I get hit with a max volume blast. I have to detach one cable, wait 60 seconds, and attach the o…
Also experiencing similar headaches with MacBookPro and 3.5mm headphone jack, HDMI, and using Bluetooth midi devices - sounds crazy to try reading all these other problems with vanilla setups. It did use to “just work”.
Re: Airpods Max Sucked for Me
#34Audio / bluetooth on macs is currently a total disaster. My newer macs - mainly a 2019 15" - have some truly bizarre behaviors around these. One example is that if I switch 3.5mm audio cables too quickly it starts routing audio to my HDMI monitor instead. Macs still can't control the volume of HDMI audio out so that means I get hit with a max volume blast. I have to detach one cable, wait 60 seconds, and attach the o…
I've had a lot of problems with USB DACs as well. I frequently find that audio degrades into a kind of stuttering or static that doesn't go away until a reboot. I've experienced this with multiple DACs (Aune, Centrance, O2, and Presonus) on multiple machines (iMac 5K, 16" MacBook Pro, and hackintosh). I feel like it's worse in recent versions of macOS (say, High Sierra and later), but it's intermittent, so it's hard to say.
Re: Airpods Max Sucked for Me
#35Somewhat surprised at the number of negative experiences. I've had them for ~3 weeks and can't believe I didn't buy them sooner. I did go from a wired headset to these for work and they're a game changer. Battery life is excellent. Noise cancelling is great. Yes, it seems to pair to the closest device but pairing is a couple of clicks away.
I have had a bad experience with battery life on my pair.
Context: during the day I use a good desktop DAC/amplifier hooked up to my laptop/desktop and a good quality wired set of headphones, but in the evening when I want to get a break from the computer I use my phone and a Bluetooth headphone.
I use either a Drop Panda or my AirPods Max. Both are very convenient. I’ll listen happily for 2-3 hours in the evening in comfort. I find myself having to charge the Airpods Max every other day, it seems to me like it drains very quickly even when it’s in the case. The panda switches off properly and is always ready to go, I can go a week without charging it with this usage pattern.
When I’ve gone to reach for the Max it’s always very low on battery or dead, even if it’s had very little usage after a charge a day or so before.
If it powered off properly I’d be a lot happier
Re: Airpods Max Sucked for Me
#36If you’re using arbitrary headsets with a desktop Mac for work conferencing from a non-empty household, run don’t walk and subscribe to https://krisp.ai/
> Speak Without Noise: With a single button, the background noise going from you to other call participants will be removed.
> Listen Without Noise: With a single button, the background noise coming from the call participants to you will be removed.
It works beautifully from desktop, in any tool, which makes sense for WFH focus. (Unfortunately they cancelled the dial-up shim number allowing it to work via mobile, which I’d appreciated.)
Much cheaper than dedicated ANC, which doesn’t remove remote noise anyway.
Re: Airpods Max Sucked for Me
#37From the article linked to in the posted article, a paragrah explaining why when Apple “fixed” AirPods Pros giving some people this ear discomfort, others of us were pissed off the noise cancelling had been dialed way back:
> ”The bottom line is, the eardrum suck phenomenon isn’t directly caused by highly effective noise canceling. It’s a side effect caused by the filter required to achieve highly effective noise canceling without encountering feedback problems. So it appears we may always have this tradeoff -- the headphones with the best noise canceling will produce the strongest eardrum suck effect.”
— “Eardrum Suck, Mystery Solved” - https://www.soundstagesolo.com/index.php/features/178-eardru...
Re: Airpods Max Sucked for Me
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious as to why the same BT profile achieved 8kHz to my Big Sur Mac with a Bluetooth 4.0 chipset, 16 kHz to a Big Sur MacBook with a Bluetooth 4.2 chipset and 24 kHz to the iPhone 11 Pro with a 5.0 chipset (and the other custom Apple chips of course). Any ideas?
How do you measure that? Most likely this is some Apple propietary sheninangs so all bets are off. They are probably limiting things in software for reasons. It is highly unlikely to be related to the BT version itself. There have been no bandwidth improvements to classic Bluetooth for decades. And Apple is unlikely to use LE Audio since BT 4.0 didn't had the required bandwidth for even full duplex 8kHz.
If you drag a Voice Memo to the finder you can find it under Get Info > More Info. This is handy because it syncs the memos from the iPhone back to the Mac for direct comparison. You can also see the it being negotiated in the debug console for both Mac and iPhone or in the Bluetooth Explorer audio graph for the Mac.
Re: Airpods Max Sucked for Me
#39Can confirm re: ANC. It's good if you don't wear glasses. With glasses, it's fine but not better than the Sony WH1000XM3's I had before.
The sound quality is really good and I can actually wear these all day (the XM3s get hot after a few hours), so I put up with it.
Re: Airpods Max Sucked for Me
#40If you can hold out for Bluetooth 5.2 devices, it includes a new audio codec [0] that might be worth waiting for.
[0]: https://www.bluetooth.com/media/le-audio/le-audio-faqs/